Hi I am trying to animate a short clip with a fire dragon. As you can see from photos the dragon renders with fire in his wings if I just do a quick render. But as soon as I make a movie the fire is gone? Nothing changes between renders or movie output. Can anyone help? Thanks!

Here is the dragon just as a render. the above is when I try to make a movie from the animation. 

unless you want to render movies at sample render settings, the only real solution is to render the movie as image files, either pngs or jpg's etc, then composite in a movie program, a tip is render short series of images, ie if you have a 500 frame movie clip, render say 100 frames at a time, that way you dont tie up the puter for hours, and if you realise after the first 100 you need to make adjustments, you've only lost 1/5th of the time and frames.....

don't forget the default movie render setting is preview, firefly render setting is the final option on the drop down menu....(in case you missed that one) imho still best to render image series.......

Your upper render looks like it was done at the preview setting. As Mysticeagle notes, it is best to render an animation using pngs, and make sure you set the render quality at Firefly. Firefly has several settings too, youll notice. If you use pngs, and no background for your image, you get a nice transparency effect, so you can slide backgrounds in as you wish. Using, of course, a video editor. The other advantage to using pngs, is that if your computer has a fit and quits working, you still have the pngs it's already rendered, and you can start right where it left off. With the avis, it is all or nothing.